ABSTRACT
Implicit in all the chapters of this book, as in the general run of historical
writing, is the conviction that it is possible to make valid statements about
what happened in the past. Here, for example, one chapter has told the story of
Sir Thomas Seymour’s last years, another has offered an explanation for the
fall of Anne Boleyn, and another has explored the role of the nobility in Tudor
England. Often the interpretations offered by other historians have been
carefully scrutinised and modified or rejected. Underlying such often detailed
papers is the belief that some interpretations are nearer the truth – because
more solidly grounded in the evidence and because more rigorously argued –
than others. On the whole such convictions are much more commonly left
unarticulated by working historians than boldly defended: they seem so
obvious as not to need explanation. Yet in recent years they have come under
attack, as the quotations with which this chapter begins show, and it is that
challenge that has prompted the response that follows. It was first conceived as
a lecture in a first-year course on Approaches to History, and it is intended
above all to draw the attention of fledgling students of history to what seems to
me a mistaken and harmful approach to history, and warn them against it. This
approach will here for the sake of convenience (and in full awareness of the
risks of simplification) be labelled ‘postmodernism’. The origins of ‘post-
modernism’ lie not in the work of historians, but rather in other disciplines,
particularly philosophy, especially the ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger,
linguistics, especially Saussure, and literary theory, especially Barthes and
Derrida. Their ideas have become very fashionable in departments of literature
and cultural studies, especially in the new universities. They have been taken up
by those who see themselves, in the words of the journal they have established,
as Rethinking History. Most of the examples given above are taken from those
who are not so much historians as would-be philosophers of history who seek
to tell practising historians what is wrong with their practice. A few – but so
far not many – historians have in recent years been influenced by such ideas;
and, at a different level, what is best called a naive nihilism or relativism
characterises the assumptions of many students. It may thus be timely for one
historian deeply suspicious of ‘postmodernism’ to set out reasons for such
suspicion.
